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Gardens
It stopped raining for a few hours yesterday, nicely timed for gardening, during which I went out and strove mightily with dahlias, which is to say earwigs, among other useful and semi-useful things,** and came indoors again as the Scary Mud Monster. Remember I told you that I’d actually staked all of my dahlias this year, and how this doesn’t happen in my garden(s)? It doesn’t work. Well, I suppose if you were out there with your bamboos and your twine every minute, or even every afternoon, you might stay ahead of the little sods, but I wouldn’t count on it. You may also remember that I’ve been complaining about my seven-foot dahlias—dahlias are supposed to be sort of four to six foot. Which is plenty. Even a six-foot dahlia has a slightly triffid air about it.*** But I’ve realised why my dahlias are all monsters this year: it’s so that they can hurl themselves over any foolish attempts to contain them. Several of my beautifully-staked dahlias have a fringe of flopped-over, head-down flowers tumbling gracefully, not to say vindictively, over the top loop of string. SIIIIIIIGH.†
This morning after service ring†† I was out in front of the cottage, deadheading.††† I’ve still got pansies in flower—I mean pansies that have been flowering since spring, and in a couple of cases since last winter. If you’re clever about it you pretty much can have pansies flowering all year long—although they may shut down in self-defense in a cold winter—but this usually requires waves of pansies. Some of this year’s have gone out back for a serious haircut, a feed, and a rest, but by no means all of them. Some of them are still frothing down my front steps, flowering determinedly. So I was determinedly deadheading them.‡ And my neighbour with the posh, national-collections garden at the top of the hill comes strolling down with a companion and says lugubriously to me, Oh, you’re losing that battle.
Thanks ever so. You’re a real friend.
Peter and I went to another posh garden this afternoon‡‡, one of those eye-wateringly so-English cottagey things that I have the almost overwhelming urge to speak loudly and frequently, saying things like Gee whillikers! and Gosh darn! This place is real gone! Peter and I used to have one of those gardens . . . but we never went in for the eye-watering aspect; ours was too clearly not under control, nor under anything resembling an all-over plan. And I get a little lip-curly about people with full time gardeners. (Or trust funds and no need to earn a living.) If I had a full-time gardener I could be opening Third House’s garden to the public in a couple of (somewhat frantic) years. The funny thing is that I don’t think I’d want to: the pleasure, if you want to call it pleasure,‡‡‡ of opening our garden was that we were the ones responsible. If you wanted to know about a plant, we were the ones to ask. We might not remember, but if we didn’t, there was no recourse.§ I’m just crabby because there was a lot to like about this garden . . . till you got to the two wide bays of really ugly orange roses. There must have been thirty of the horrible things. All orange. I like hot dazzling orange fine in neat little wool-and-silk cardigans such as the one I am wearing this minute. But neon orange is not a good colour in a rose. Especially not in ranks at the front of the sculpted topiary tunnel to the lily pond with the summerhouse and the tasteful statuary. Gah. No, Gee whillikers!
* * *
* Possibly my least favourite critter on the planet, barring things big enough to eat me and standing close enough to try
** Including potting on two camellias, which have been quietly getting on with things for two years in the pots they arrived from the mail-order nursery in. One of the best things about camellias is how patient they are. A kind word and a handful of well rotted chicken crap and they’re happy indefinitely. You think I’m anthropomorphising about the kind word, don’t you? HA. Show me a little old lady who talks to her plants and I’ll show you a little old lady who can barely get out her back door for being throttled by the botanical riot. No I am not talking about me. I am not little. And I haven’t fully arrived at the ‘old’. And while it’s perfectly true I talk to my plants^ I tend to say things like what are you doing that for, you frelling thing? and ARRRRRRGH. And, when dealing with rosebushes, OWWWWWW. But I’m mostly nice to my camellias. I’ve pretty much even stopped cursing Jingle Bells for being fabulously healthy, floriferous and UGLY.
^ I talk to almost everything except other people. Other people, feh. Way too complicated. Give me a rosebush or a hellhound any day.
*** It’s not so much the height, it’s the posture. Forty-foot roses dangling from trees can be very intimidating, but they’re not at all triffidy.
† Clearly I haven’t been saying the right things to them.
†† During which I was Much Put Upon. Not only did I keep finding myself in the long-thirds position when a single was called for Grandsire, but I fell afoul of the Dreaded Three-Four Down Dodge Single in bob minor several times, about which mediocre ringers lie awake on Saturday nights worrying about being traumatised by if bob minor is attempted on Sunday morning. I did, by the way—get through all these trials—but I had to be carried home and fed chocolate to recover.^
^ And speaking of feeding . . . Peter has just spilt chicken broth—you know, the stuff that accumulates under a roast chicken—rather lavishly on the floor. Hellhounds did not stir. I called them. They stared at me. I called them again. Chaos, always the one more anxious about pleasing,+ crept out at last and crushed himself to me, as I knelt on the floor next to a pool of fresh chicken juice. Here, look at that, I said, extricating an arm and pointing. Chaos looked at the finger, the way dogs do++. I eventually persuaded him to have a sniff at the lovely chickeny puddle. To please me he did, with his feet braced, still leaning against me, and with his neck stretched to its furthest extent. He sniffed. He then looked at me with a ‘Can I go now?’ expression.
After he had fled back to the dog bed in huge relief, Darkness came nonchalantly out to make sure he wasn’t missing anything. He had a half-hearted lick and then turned around to fix me with a ‘You got us up for this? look.
Peter mopped up the spill.
+ Except, of course, when it comes to food
++ There was an article in a recent TIME magazine about the intelligence of critters, and how there’s more of it around than generally thought. Depends on who you ask, of course. I know a lot of critter people who have been sniggering at the scientists about this sort of thing for years. But one of the things the article cites is that dogs ‘innately’ understand about pointing fingers being about pointing, and not about the finger. Well, sort of. It depends on the dog and the context. Pointers certainly point, and they know they’re pointing. But your own pet dog is very likely to be interested in the finger, because it’s your finger. Chaos has a very bad case of this.
††† I should try to get someone to take a photo of me deadheading the Non Trailing Petunias in the hanging basket. I can feel how ridiculous—how increasingly ridiculous—I look, especially as the petunias themselves grow more ridiculous, ramrod straight and soaring out into the ozone.
‡ Kneeling on tarmac at least keeps the Scary Mud Monster somewhat at bay.
‡‡ In the rain. It came back.
‡‡‡ I didn’t, much. I’ve told you, I think, that Peter was always out there talking to people. I used to try to find an especially impenetrable thicket and spent the afternoon weeding. Peter would occasionally send people in after me who wanted particularly to talk about roses.
§ We did have a once a week body I used to refer to as our gardeneroid. His purpose was to move slowly around the garden looking like he was doing something, and adding rusticity to the view. He also mowed the lawn.
More contest winners!
It’s been a murky sort of day, both exteriorly and interiorly. Interiorly neither my brain nor my digestion is returning my phonecalls.* Exteriorly it’s been another dashing-among-the-raindrops day with slitty-eyed and grumbling hellhounds. This morning I eventually said All right! Fine! But if you think we’re going to play throw the tennis ball up/downstairs just because of a little rain** you are sadly mistaken! —And stomped back outdoors myself to stand with the rain running down my neck to deadhead petunias. Especially that frelling hanging basket at the foot of the front stairs, with the nonhanging petunias: gone-over petunia flowers are among the least attractive anyway, and even more/less so when sodden, and these are so awfully dranglefabbing conspicuous. Since the wretched plants insist on growing UP they are also getting harder and harder to deadhead. Even my gorilla-length arms eventually reach their limit. And getting smacked in the face with falling smeary wet ex-petunias is one of those remind-me-why-I-like-to-say-I’m-a-gardener experiences.***
I was lurking around the cottage in a restless and unable-to-concentrate manner because the Aga Man was due. Herself† has been cold for over two months because after a hot spell severe enough for me to decide to turn her off I couldn’t get her back on again and thought, never mind, it’s summer, we can wait till her annual tune-up and shampoo and get a refresher lesson on the proper ritual.††
My Aga is now on. I have an oven at the cottage again.
So what better day for an announcement about baking?
Anyone who’s been keeping an eye on the contest thread will already know that mayasings’ Bloody Doomsday Chocolate Raspberry Swirl (Vampire) Muffins won the recipe contest. Huzzah mayasings! Huzzah Vampire Muffins!†††
I also promised you‡ a random winner among the voters. And that winner is Stephanie, who very properly lists ‘baked goods’ among her interests, and while I will not breach her privacy by quoting her email address here, I wish to remark that it has a very pleasing and suitable Green & Black’s atmosphere about it.
Congratulations, you two! And now if you would please contact a mod—Ajlr, perhaps, since she’s done the actual work on the contest—with street-mail addresses and instructions for dedications, if any, I will go fish out two more glittery gold SUNSHINEs from my dwindling hoard and prepare to dispatch same.
Contests are good. Thanks, you lot, for making them good.
* * *
* Not that I have (i)Phones on the (missing) brain or anything. I had a seriously bad night last night. Sleep? What would that be again? And then the phone rang at 8:30 a.m. KrzzzznARRRRGHblhhhhhhhnnggg. I decided to go back to bed afterward anyway, despite the re-enactment of the Battle of Hastings apparently going on across the road and the four-part dog chorus^ at the top of the hill, no doubt in response to Devil Cat sitting just on the other side of the (closed) iron gate from them and washing his paws thoughtfully. I could seriously do without Devil Cat. I could probably even more seriously do without the 1,712 vehicles belonging to his owner, who has one parking slot on our cul de sac and therefore has to be creative with the other 1,711.
Anyway. I went back to bed. Whereupon Pooka started erupting with sound effects. I’m sure it’s very clever and thoughtful of the programmer to give different ringtones to email, voicemail, texts, twenty-one gun salutes and elephants, but it’s not at all popular when you’re pretending to sleep. I have noticed that there’s the odd ping, pong or trill overnight in Pooka’s live and lively company, but it hasn’t been a big deal. Maybe I’ve had the pillow arranged over my head better. Maybe I had been sleeping lately. Maybe I suddenly became fabulously popular overnight. But this morning it was the Chinese water torture only with dings, chirrups and gibbles. So the first thing I did when I finally gave up the unequal struggle with the Normans^^ was figure out how to turn the sound effects off.
^ Three dachshunds and a Labrador
^^ Norman arrows caroming off the English shield wall sound remarkably like messages arriving on your Apocalypse.
** It’s more to do with almost losing four shelves of books and china that hang at the bottom of the stairs, the last time we played this interesting game.
*** At least there were no earwigs involved. Ewwwwww. There are almost always earwigs involved when you deadhead dahlias. Note: if you are harbouring any seven-foot dahlias this year, stand at arm’s length when you deadhead.
† You’re right, I’ve never named her. Shameful. I think it has seemed impertinent since she was here long before I was. But I hereby declare that five—no, wait, six years, big yeep—six years is enough to presume upon the company of a nameless Aga, and address myself to the lack.
†† No, no, no, not a black goat. A bowl of virgin popcorn, and don’t forget the butter^.
^ Which I’m sure ought to be from a virgin cow, but this might be a little hard to arrange, milk being tied to the non-virgin end of things.
††† I’m convinced it’s the fang holes that did it. Although as Ajlr says: . . . which, as a title alone, may be one of the most all-encompassing collections of ‘Words Likely to Appeal to Readers of Robin’s Books’ that we’ve seen here.^ Add that to the end result of the recipe and we have a very worthy winner. And I may say that the recipes assembled through this competition are probably one of the best gatherings of foodstuffs with few socially-redeeming features^^ that I’ve seen for some time…
^ I wish to observe that on the contrary, this is a SUNSHINE specific recipe, and very appropriate too. A truly all-McKinley-encompassing recipe would have to include something about dragons, swords and horses, at very least. Which might prove challenging even to this reservoir of forum members.
^^ Few? You mean there are any? Oh dear.
‡ That is, I promised after I had double-checked with Blogmom
Life with the Apocalypse
The problem with going to bed with a small pink hellhound* is that you lay her down on her shelf next to your glasses, you turn the light off, you roll over and snuggle down in your pillows, and all in the same motion you continue rolling till you’re facing the frelling shelf again and utterly without motive force or direction your hand reaches out, plucks her small pinkness neatly out from under your glasses and—because by this time your other arm is free too—you flick the nice pink case open and push the slider over and . . . you’re in business. All while your Higher Self and your Superego are yelling, No! No! No! No! It’s already past mmph o’clock because you were reading in the bath again and you have to get up tomorrow** before Niall and Colin show up for handbells*** because you have a novel to write!† Meanwhile my Lower Self and my Underego are arguing about whether we’re going to play a game or cruise the web†† . . . The situation is aggravated by the fact that not only is Apocalypse’s††† screen beautifully lit, of course, but most of the default settings of itty-itty-bitty are more easily read without glasses than with. I’m already blowing up enemy aliens‡ before my responsible adult synapses have had a chance to marshal their arguments. Have you noticed the way your flighty, impetuous side keeps the response times of a six-year-old while the sober, conscientious side that earns your living and puts chicken in the mouths of your hellhounds gets all elderly and creaky as the years pass?‡‡
The iPhone. Whose idea was an iPhone? Okay, where do I start? With Raphael and Gabriel. My own Computer Men.‡‡‡ I’m going to have to downgrade them to demons again.§ It all really began several months ago with that half hour on Raphael’s mere paltry iPhone3 and Angry Birds.§§ And while I didn’t get around to buying my own Angry Birds till after not only Fingerzilla but the Chambers Dictionary and Thesaurus and the Oxford Medical Dictionary, I nonetheless did buy it§§§. And I sailed through the first four or five levels of the first set and then started . . . slowing . . . down, because the truth is I’m an old retro fogey and all this hand-eye coordination stuff is kind of beyond me. I stuck on level ten for about three days, and then last night, HURRAH!, I did it! I flattened the sucker! Pigs and timbers everywhere! Yaaaay! . . .
And I still got level failed!! What do you mean, level failed, you . . . contraption? FAILED? If that was a failure, I’m a . . . well, angry robin is perhaps a phrase that oozes to mind. . . . So, having scorned Raphael’s suggestion a few days ago that I CHEAT and google angry birds walkthroughs, tonight, when I find myself mysteriously clutching Apocalypse after I’ve turned the light out and taken my glasses off, I’m going to zap on google and . . .
* * *
* Aside from making the original hellhounds JEALOUS, but fortunately they don’t recognise Apocalypse as a member of their clan. They haven’t heard her bark yet however.
** Er—today
*** At 5 pm. Ha ha ha ha ha ha. Wait a minute, aren’t authors supposed to keep strange hours? Raphael rang me at nine thirty yesterday morning. Nine thirty! What does he think I am, a butcher, a baker of cinnamon rolls As Big As Your Head, a candlestick maker? No, but I am a bell ringer, and I have considered just staying up through service ring on Sunday morning and going to bed after. But that would make Sundays when we ring again in the afternoon somewhat challenging. And it would probably confuse the hellhounds.
† And hellhounds to hurtle. I’m trying to decide which would shorten my life faster: ignoring hellhounds or ignoring Story in Progress. There would probably be a tiny inverse pop^ and hellhounds, SinP and I would all disappear, and a microscopic sucking void would materialise, if materialise is quite the word I mean . . . and it would all become very Lovecraftian, or possibly Ripley’s Believe It or Not.^^
^ Sort of a . . . opo
^^ Did anyone else have the crap scared out of them by Ripley’s, passed around the playground at recess or the park after school? When I was a kid they were both in the Sunday papers and in horrible cheesy nightmare-inducing paperback books. When you’re nine years old your grasp of what constitutes ‘scientific method’ and/or ‘reliable witness’ may be a little wobbly. Fairy tales already gave me the whimwhams because they contributed too much range and detail to the things you knew lived under the bed and in the closet+, but at least you could tell yourself they were fiction.++ But Ripley’s was science fact!! It said so! And Ripley’s monsters were notoriously resistant to the standard repertoire of garlic, silver, buckets of water, etc. People disappeared a lot in Ripley’s too.
+ It occurs to me this may be where my habit of keeping the spaces under furniture tightly wedged with All Stars and boxes of books originated. Monsters, like the rest of us, prefer to be comfortable. Any sensible monster would look elsewhere than under any of my furniture. And I’ve already told you about the lack of closets in English houses.
++ Even if the best ones were hundreds or thousands of years old, and retold and retold and retold all that time, and where there’s smoke there’s fire. And yes, when I was nine, I still believed in monsters. I’d wised up to Santa Claus when I was four, and I never did believe in the tooth fairy, although money is always good. But monsters: I totally believed in monsters. Sigh. Life is not fair.
†† Or check frelling Twitter. Why did I load Twitter? GEEZUM. I can spend hours clicking through to other accounts, seeing who other people are following, checking out their web sites, reading excerpts, reading blogs, lengthening my wish lists for the next time I just happen to be on a book-selling site, and generally wasting time—while feeling as if I’m expanding my professional knowledge and savoir faire. It’s totally the 140-character limit that makes it so dangerous. You can skim forever, and . . .
††† AKA Pooka. Sometimes screaming APOCALYPSE, while it has an excellent way of clearing the road before you of superfluous dweebs bumbling about their unnecessary business, is just too many syllables. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/pooka http://www.irelandseye.com/paddy3/preview2.htm , http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Pooka
I prefer the benign but mischievous version myself, and something that might at any moment turn itself into a prancing steed of course is very popular with me.
‡ Earth Defender. Not really satisfactory. I bought it because the customer reviews all said it was too easy, and I thought, Great! That’s for me! Unfortunately it is too easy. And if I just want to blow stuff up, well, Fingerzilla is my shining paragon. Although . . . I think I posted here that I’d bought an add-on that was going to give me six new levels and new stuff to blow up. So last night—having tortured myself for a couple of abstemious days with pleasurable anticipation—I barged (Roar! Stomp! Crunch!) through the (apparent) hooking up of the six new levels, with various headlines witnessing my success appearing between games and urging me on to ever greater feats of destruction and depravity and . . . I got to the end, was congratulated for being a monster of monsters^ and . . . nothing has changed. No new stuff to blow up. No new cities. It’s enough to make a genocidal leviathan cry. I suppose I will have to email the proprietors and ask them what they’re doing with my 59p.
^ Ripley’s hasn’t contacted me yet. I can’t imagine why.
‡‡ Wasn’t I just saying something about unfair?
‡‡‡ It’s not like I bought her from them! Noooooo! They ensorcelled me from pure disinterested wickedness!
I am proud to say that I am passing the contagion on however. Fiona showed up this week with her apocalypse, I mean iPhone4, named Tilly, for PesTILential Device. Fiona, however, says she had to give up Fingerzilla because it was giving her repetitive strain injury. Oops.
What she needs is to take up bell ringing to strengthen her hands.
§ Exposing an innocent to the iTunes store alone is worth a Dantean circle or two. GAAH.
§§ http://www.rovio.com/index.php?page=angry-birds
§§§ Also the Screetch, Earth Defend, Plants vs. Zombies, and Osmos. If you’re counting.
Hellhound birthday!!!!
[Note: four exclamation marks because they're four years old.]
The humans are having champagne.*
I had been foolishly and light-headedly planning to post a photo of hellhounds eating, as a dramatic contrast to their birthday last year. They do now mostly eat, most of the time, and we seem to be in a goodish** patch right now. I was aware that I was being imprudent, not to say positively rash, to assume that this scheme could be brought off successfully.
And then it looked like I had just got lucky. Hellhounds have developed the charming, normal-canine-like habit of coming out and cruising for dropped scraps while I’m chopping up the roast chicken that gets mixed into the dog food *** to encourage them to EAT IT. I’m so totally thrilled at the idea of their contracting an 
interest in food (much better late than never) that I push bits of chicken off the counter deliberately. Usually they mill for a bit and then slouch back to their bed so I have to call them out when I actually put the food down.† Tonight Darkness came out of his own accord and stood there looking alert and hungry. So if Darkness was being all forward and everything, Chaos decided he could do it too.
So I had two hellhounds standing up and eating in the middle of the kitchen floor—PERFECT for a photo. . . .
In the time it took me to get my camera out, Darkness had suddenly realised that he was eating in the middle of the kitchen floor!!!!, had recoiled with suitable emphasis, and had gone and wedged himself back in his corner by the refrigerator, where he usually goes, weary in every limb and generally deeply depressed of demeanour, when I call them out for a meal. 
Chaos, who, while generally the nutsier of the two, does have normal moments, looked around, noticed that Darkness had left him all alone in the middle of the kitchen floor, paused (I held my breath)—wavered—and decided that was Darkness’ business, went back to his supper, and finished the lot.
Darkness was still lying in his corner, staring at me. I was supposed to bring him his dish, you see. I have mostly learnt only to put it down by the refrigerator so he can’t do this to me, but tonight I got all excited and lost my head.
Chaos looked around for his treats. They get two little bits of neat chicken for afters. So with Darkness’ eyes boring into me, Chaos got his treats and went (smugly) back to the dog bed.
Fortunately at this point Darkness broke—the truth is that if we were in a bad eating patch I would have brought him his dish—rushed over to his dinner and hoovered it up with remarkable speed. And then smacked his butt down on the floor and looked around for me again—because he wanted his treats.
I am a sap, of course. Chaos got seconds. He came shooting out of the dog bed when he saw Darkness getting his, and hellhound memories are short. Fine. Whatever. They ate their dinner. I get to sleep tonight. Maybe.
But we can still have a few other photos celebrating the beauty, grace and elegance of hellhounds.††
* * *
* I need the champagne. I’m just back from another long evening of handbells. I got suckered into it this time because last week’s quarter of bob minor sounded so pretty and went so well I’ve got all pensive and yearning about learning bob major^, which requires a fourth person with a fourth pair of hands. We were two fours tonight—positively a heaving mob. And I did get to ring major, with Niall and James, but our fourth was Titus. Didn’t I say a fourth pair of hands? Ringing with Titus^^ is exciting enough when you know the method.
It took us two tries, but we did get through a plain course. At the end of which James turned to me, beaming, and said, you’ll be ringing a quarter of bob major soon.
As I say, I need the champagne.
^ Bob major specifically because you’re two-thirds or so already there by knowing bob minor. Any other method you’re starting all over from scratch. Starting from scratch in handbells is like growing your own wheat and milling your own flour and catching your own wild yeast when you want a slice of toast.
^^ Who has to ring both his bells in one hand. He holds them crossed, at ninety degrees, and shakes them up and down to make one ring and sideways to make the other ring. This does work, after a fashion, but there are kind of a lot of rows with too many or too few pings in them, which is disconcerting since you ring handbells largely by counting, and since he usually rings the trebles—because they weigh the least—you haven’t a prayer of seeing when the treble is leading, which is kind of crucial.
** So long as I don’t alarm them by toxic superfluities like leftover lamb mince, etc.
*** Yes, I know about BARF^. We had a couple of traumatic skirmishes with raw chicken wings and once with sheep bones—I think it was sheep: something large, anyway—and I retired from the field in confusion and dismay.
^ Bones and Raw Food
† No, of course they don’t just come out on their own. These are hellhounds.^
^ Hmm. I wonder if they’d do any better on raw goblin.
†† And last but not least, on the subject of eating and not eating, I love this: 
English speakers are dumber. You have to tell them louder.
Ask Robin on a Monday
So I rang a very nice touch of Stedman Doubles tonight at Old Eden where the calls were all in weird places (which is something that happens with frelling Stedman*) and I had to perform both cats’ ears and coathangers** and I did it all*** and I feel all flushed with success.† And this morning wasn’t half bad either.†† So while I’m feeling as if I have the answers to everything††† I thought I’d tackle an Ask Robin.
My question is about characters’ names. I’ve tried writing some fantasy stories, so I know how hard it can be to come up with new, mythical-sounding names. But when you do it, there seems to be a system to the names. What I mean is that although the names are completely made up, groups of names fit the cultures/countries they are in. I’m thinking particularly of the Damar names, where the names all fit the Damarian culture and linguistic sound, even though the culture and the names are all fictional. Do you have a system for coming up with names? I heard from one writer that he takes common names and re-invents their spelling so that they look exotic. Do you do anything like that? Or do they just come to you?
At least some of the answer to this is somewhere on the web site, but I can’t find it. I would have sworn it was in the FAQ under one of those general writery questions, but . . . I can’t find it. Arrgh. So if this looks kind of familiar to you and you can find it . . . will you please tell me where it is?
I’m also amused that the asker says ‘groups of names fit the cultures/countries they are in’. Yaay. Success. One of the biggest, hairiest challenges about writing fantasy or science fiction is making your ‘imaginary’ countries and creatures feel real, feel like a consistent whole—or an inconsistent one, for that matter, the way the sometimes-more-and-sometimes-less consensual reality we live in here is so often drastically inconsistent.
But much of Damar is a fairly unified culture—as are Balsinland and Rhiandomeer in PEGASUS—and so the names, the rituals and traditions, the habits and history, need to feel as if they hang together: they need to look and smell and taste and sound right. What an appalling prospect. I am so grateful I’m not making this stuff up.
Now I have said in the FAQ that I don’t make this stuff up: it’s more like it happens to me. This is not to say it’s easy; it isn’t.‡ First there’s the trying to take notes in the whirlwind aspect: even if you manage to hang onto your notebook‡‡ you may be picked up and thrown several hundred or several thousand miles off-course . . . possibly even into the wrong frelling story. Well, what you think is the wrong frelling story. There is also a good bit of Helen Keller at the water-pump: you know there’s a world out there, and there’s this new person who keeps following you around and won’t leave you alone, but what is she trying to tell you?
But if you’re a storyteller and this is your story, you’ll eventually make the connections you need to make, and start looking and listening and feeling around in the dark for the stuff you need to know. I literally‡‡‡ see and hear a lot of the background to a story—mostly in way too dazzling detail—and which frequently doesn’t fit together, and then I have to try to figure out why it doesn’t fit together, or skip that bit as beyond me.§ I hear most of the major characters’ names—and when I’m lucky, most of the minor ones’ too—by the simple expedient of hanging around listening to them talking to each other. Eventually they’ll call each other by name. I heard Ebon’s name just the way it happened to Sylvi: They really don’t tell you anything, do they? I’ve known you were Sylvi forever. My name is Ebon. Sylvi’s own name bothered me for months—I was sure (I was almost sure) I was hearing it right, but there was still something wrong. It wasn’t till I heard her spoken to in some formal ritual or other—and I don’t even remember which one—that I found out it was short for Sylviianel, and then I felt a lot better.
Occasionally I cannot, cannot, cannot hear someone’s name, and then I do have to try to make it up, based on what fragments or nicknames§§ I am hearing, and what I have by then learnt about the language. But I hate this. I’m always sure I’m wrong.
My jaw drops at ‘I heard from one writer that he takes common names and re-invents their spelling so that they look exotic.’ My reaction is totally ewwww. But every writer is different. If I found myself doing that I’d be certain I was in the wrong story and start looking around for a whirlwind to catapult me somewhere else. But this is only the way I work; if that’s what works for him, and he gets good stories out of it, then that’s all that matters.
Good stories are what matter. Write that down.
* * *
* It has to do with the fact that the treble, which in most methods has an easier path through the maze, moves just like all the other working bells, which in Stedman is a very maze-like track indeed.
** Sic. It has to do with what the line looks like on the page. Cats’ ears actually do look like a kid’s drawing of a cat’s ears. Coathangers don’t look anything like coathangers.
*** We will not get into the total frelling mess I made of ringing the four to Very Little Bob. The four squats in the middle of the pattern making thirds and fourths while the other five bells do fancy dances around her. The point is supposed to be that it will teach me what thirds and fourths feel like, which will help my Cambridge, which has lots of thirds and fourths in it. Wrong. It just felt like a really really bad bit of Cambridge that went on and on.
† The hellhounds even ate dinner again. Gaah. Last night we had some lamb mince left over so I put it in their supper. Aaaugh! What is this! What are you doing to us! Death! Poison! Betrayal! Goblins! Darkness eventually got over it. Chaos didn’t. Next generation of domestic fauna it’s goldfish. Plastic goldfish.
†† We had a special service for some saint or other at Old Eden. I spent most of it on the five, which, of all Old Eden’s possessed-by-demons bells, is the worst. But we were only ringing simple stuff so no one noticed that the five and I were locked in an epic battle for mastery. This is almost as great a triumph as a touch of Stedman Doubles.
††† Possibly even how PEG II ends. I said possibly.
‡ Ringing the fifth bell at Old Eden is a doddle in comparison.
‡‡ Or your laptop
‡‡‡ If ‘literally’ bothers you, feel free to choose your own adverb. ‘Madly’ might do. Or ‘obstinately’.
§ Note: sigh. It happens. Or anyway it happens to me.
§§ ‘Yo! Dumbhead!’
